Digital camera technology has advanced significantly over the past decade. Today, digital cameras are affordable, take high quality pictures, and can be made very small. As a result, digital cameras are becoming increasingly popular and, for many people, digital cameras have replaced the conventional film-based camera. Furthermore, digital cameras are now included in many types of electronic devices that perform functions other than picture-taking functions. For example, many mobile communication terminals, such as mobile telephones and PDAs, now include small digital cameras as an additional feature of the mobile telephone.
In addition to the advancements in digital camera technology, significant advancements have been made in memory technology. Mainly, these advancements have led to memory devices that are smaller and more affordable than in the past. As a result, a single handheld electronic device may be able to hold hundreds, if not thousands, of photos. Furthermore, since a person does not have to purchase film and since the pictures can be easily downloaded from the camera to a computer or other large memory device, people now take many more photographs than they did in the past. In fact, it is quite possible that many digital camera users will accumulate tens of thousands of digital photographs over a lifetime. As a result, better systems for organizing and sorting digital images are needed to help a user keep track of and use these digital photographs.
Similar organizational problems may arise with the accumulation of other media files, such as emails or document files. Like digital photographs, a user can quickly accumulate vast amounts of these files and very often the user will not take the time to create unique file folders and place the files into the appropriate file folders. A user may intend to organize their files by returning to the files at a later time and renaming the files and/or placing the files in uniquely-named file folders; however, many users quickly fall behind using such an approach. These users may fall so behind that it is nearly impossible to sort back through all of the files.
With textual files the problem may not be as bad as with image files, since, with textual files, the user can often search through the stores of files using word searching software, where the software searches through the contents of each file to locate a particular word or phrase. However, with non-textual files, such as most image files, a user must actually view each of the thumbnails to have any indication of the content of the photograph. Organizing, sorting, and finding images is further hampered by the fact that most camera devices store each image using an indistinct file name, such as by storing consecutive images as consecutive numbers. What is needed is an easy way of annotating images and other files with information that will help identify and/or categorize the file. Preferably, a solution to the problem would allow for customized annotations that are personal to the user. It would also be preferable if the system allowed, if not forced, the user to annotate the files when the files are first created, viewed, opened, closed, or otherwise operated upon by the user.
Currently, a user may be able to use some electronic devices to annotate a photo in a post-processing stage. This annotation process, however, typically requires the user to go through at least several steps/menus in order to annotate the photo after it is taken. For example, a simple post-processing annotation may be where the user, after a photo is taken, (1) creates a sub folder, (2) modifies the folder's name to a unique/identifiable category name, and (3) stores the photo in this folder. This type of annotation procedure, however, has several disadvantages. First, folder navigation and file manipulation are time consuming tasks, particularly if attempted on a portable electronic device. Further, this method does not work well if a photo belongs in two or more categories. For example, suppose that a photo is of the user's family during their trip to New York City for Christmas in 2005. The user may desire to create three separate file folders entitled “family,” “NYC trip,” and “Christmas 2005” and place the photo in all three folders. Including the file in three different folders, however, would likely require the user to go through the folder-making process three times and require that three separate copies of the photo be made. As a result of all of the steps involved, a user will likely pick one folder to put the photo in, thus limiting the ability to quickly find particular photos of interest at a later time. Such a solution also limits the amount of annotation information to what can be written in the folder and files names. Furthermore, since text input is a tedious task on most portable electronic devices, any solution where the user must constantly type new file names, folder names, or other annotation information for each photo would not be optimal.
Available software may also enable a user to add annotations on a personal computer (“PC”) at a much later time; after transferring the photos from the portable electronic device to the PC. In this case, however, the user has to remember which annotation should be included with which photos. As described above, because users typically transfer a large number of images at a time (e.g. over 100 photos for a medium-sized memory card), adding annotations by this approach can be very tedious for the user. More often than not, the user will likely be overwhelmed by the task of annotating 100 photos and will end up doing a poor job of organizing and/or annotating the photos.
Furthermore, when annotating images with post-processing software, the annotation often must be external of the image file and is typically application dependent. Thus, when a user moves the image file the photo annotation will often be left behind or at least will be incompatible with the application to which the user provided the image file.
In sum, the above described solutions typically require the user to go through many steps in order to organize or annotate a file, thus limiting the usability of such solutions. Furthermore, inputting text into a portable electronic device is often tedious, and some devices such as digital media storage don't even have text input ability at all. As a result, users will not use such solutions frequently.
Accordingly, a device is needed that encourages a user to add annotation information to an image or file when the image is first created, previewed, received, or opened by a portable electronic device. It would be beneficial if other applications could also utilize the annotation data included in or with a file. At the same time, the annotation process needs to be fast, easy, and require a minimum amount of steps and user inputs for the annotation process to be successfully utilized on a portable electronic device without frustrating or annoying the user. Along the same lines, the solution should be easy to operate with the limited number of keys or user input devices that are typically included on digital cameras, mobile phones, or other handheld electronic devices. Ideally, with regard to the annotation of digital photographs, the task of annotating photos would become intuitively integrated with the photo capturing task.